News of the week

Bitcoin Climbed Over $4000 as Crypto Loses $14 Billion in a Week

Bitcoin has surpassed $4,000 for the first time in two weeks. The price of the world’s best-known cryptocurrency climbed almost 7 percent to $4,037 on Thursday. The last time the digital currency was trading at the $4,000 level was on Dec. 4. It began to plummet in mid-November after months of stability, restoring volatility in an asset known to jump or fall hundreds of dollars within hours. It has fallen almost 80 percent since a record high near $20,000 in December last year. Earlier this week, Bitcoin began to jolt upward on the anniversary of the cryptocurrency’s all-time high.

Bloomberg reports thah Facebook is reportedly making a cryptocurrency for users of the messaging service WhatsApp. The token will purportedly be used for money transfers made within the app, and will focus on the remittances market in India. Citing sources familiar with the matter, Bloomberg states that Facebook is developing a stablecoin. Facebook is still working on a strategy for custody assets i.e. the asset to which the stablecoin will be tied.

UAE has put forward that they would be coming up with a regulation for ICOs in Mid 2019. According to the recent news coming in from the Middle East, UAE’s financial regulator the Securities and Commodities Authority is planning to introduce regulations for initial coin offering (ICO) in the country by the end of the first half of 2019. This move by the regulator is aimed at providing companies another avenue to raise capital through crowdfunding. Although the regulator has clearly stated that these regulations will be pertaining only to the ICO’s as what happens to other cryptocurrencies is not their concern.

Odilon Almeida, the president of Western Union Global Money Transfer. has claimed the company is “ready to adopt any kind of currency,” potentially including cryptocurrencies. Almeida stated there is no big difference between cryptocurrencies and regular digital payments, the likes of which Western Union has been handling for years. Almeida believes that the firm’s long-term stance makes it potentially ready to launch any type of currency, including blockchain-based ones.

Major United States-based crypto wallet provider and exchange service Coinbase has launched an educational project that lets users earn cryptocurrency as they learn about it. The program, dubbed “Coinbase Earn”. Coinbase Earn has launched in an invite-only mode, with an initial focus on one digital asset, the ERC-20 token 0x (ZRX). The central idea, the post outlines, “is for users to understand more about an asset’s utility and its underlying technology, while getting a bit of the asset to try out.”

Oásis Supermercados, a Brazilian supermarket chain located in Rio de Janeiro, has recently started accepting cryptocurrency payments after asking a local exchange for information, and training its employees on how to do it. The chain’s clients in Rio de Janeiro will now be able to pay for their things using Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, and Litecoin, according to one of the firm’s managers Douglas Andrade.